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Mint Cordial Frappe
Make a syrup of ½ ounce ginger essence, ½ dram tincture capsicum, 1 ounce brandy, 3 drams solution citric acid, 1 ounce raspberry vinegar, enough syrup to make 32 ounces. Use 2 ounces of this syrup in 12-ounce glass, add fresh mint sprigs, press latter against side of glass to get flavor, fill glass ⅔ full of shaved ice, fill with coarse stream, top with mint, serve straws.
This is fountain shorthand: a bottled flavoring syrup made up in a 32-ounce batch, then drawn two ounces at a time into an iced glass. Read the measures as apothecary fluid measure, not kitchen spoons.
- Drams and ouncesEight fluid drams make one fluid ounce, so a dram is about 3.7 ml and the ½ dram of capsicum is under 2 ml spread across a full quart of syrup. Half an ounce is a tablespoon; one ounce is two.
- YieldThe batch makes 32 ounces of syrup, dispensed at 2 ounces per glass: sixteen drinks. The recipe says nothing about storage; corked and refrigerated it should keep for some time on the strength of its sugar, acid and alcohol.
- "Syrup" means fountain simple syrupNot maple, not cane syrup. Fountain stock syrup was a heavy sugar solution, roughly two parts sugar to one part water by weight, boiled and strained. Anything thinner will not carry the flavoring or hold up against shaved ice.
- Ginger essence and tincture of capsicumBoth are alcoholic extracts from the druggist's shelf, far stronger than ground spice "bite" you get in a ginger syrup. If you substitute, use only a food-grade cayenne or ginger extract; herbal capsicum tinctures sold today are often labeled for external use and should not go into a drink.
- Solution of citric acidAn ambiguous instruction. Fountain and pharmacy manuals of the period gave several different strengths, and this book does not say which it means. Mix your own to a known strength and adjust the 3 drams to taste rather than guessing.
- Raspberry vinegarNot salad vinegar. This is the old shrub: raspberries steeped in vinegar and boiled up with sugar into a sweet-tart drinking syrup. A modern raspberry shrub concentrate is the closest equivalent; plain fruit vinegar will make the glass sour and thin.
- The mint is pressed, not muddledThe sprigs go in whole and are crushed lightly against the glass, which is what the recipe directs. Grinding mint to a pulp is commonly said to make the drink bitter, and it leaves shreds in the straw.
- "Coarse stream"Fountain taps had a fine stream for agitating and mixing and a coarse stream for filling. Use plain carbonated water poured steadily down the side of the glass so the ice does not knock the gas out of it.
The soda fountain spent the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries producing careful imitations of the bar next door, and this is one of them: a mint julep in outline, with the brandy cut to an ounce in a quart of syrup and the missing warmth of spirits supplied instead by ginger essence and a trace of capsicum on the back of the throat. Frapp he/em>, from the French frapper, to chill or strike, was borrowed for drinks served cold, and in fountain usage it generally signalled that the drink was built over ice rather than into a soda. Recipes like this also show how close the drugstore soda fountain still stood to the dispensary ions were pharmacy stock, measured in the apothecary's fluid drams, and the same clerk who compounded a prescription compounded the syrup.